Disarming Monstrous Mouths: Visual and Literary Narratives of the Trans-Continental Hunt in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

In a poem honoring the consulship of Stilicho (De consulatu stilichonis, ca. 400 C.E.) Claudian narrates a mythic hunt across Africa and the Indian subcontinent in search of wild beasts and raw ivory. From the violent wrenching of dentine from the mouths of elephants, to the dramatized ferocity and physical strength of leopards “and other marvels,” the poem glosses the trade in animals and animal materials as the spoils of a heroic battle between gods and beasts. In a similar way, ivory presentation diptychs commissioned by Stilicho and other Roman officials materially signaled the wealth harnessed trans-continentally by the imperial administration while depicting the theatrical hunt of non-native species in the arenas of Rome and Constantinople. But like the games enjoyed by the Roman public, ivory presentation diptychs also rehearse this drama between order and chaos: the harmony imposed onto the base struggles of man and beast by the palpable, physical “weight” of the depicted imperial system. After introducing the visual and literary sources of late antique Roman venationes (staged hunts) and other arena games, this paper turns to the reuse and recarving of late antique ivory presentation diptychs in the Carolingian period. I close in arguing that, within this new and distinctly Christian imperial framework, depictions of real and imagined species on reused late antique ivories found imaginative expression within a moralized, hierarchical conception of both pictorial space and cosmological order.